Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life during War by Zachariah Cherian Mampilly (review)

This book is a must-read for anybody wishing to understand why some rebels assemble comprehensive administrations to rule civilians while others fail to do so or reject this task. In his analysis, Mampilly challenges claims of other scholars that economic incentives drive rebel organization and goals, arguing instead for a process-based approach. In his well-researched surveys of rebel governance in Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers, Sudan’s SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army), and Congo’s RCD-Goma (Rasemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie–Goma), Mampilly finds that preconflict political environments weigh heavily in shaping how rebels rule, but within this context rebels make consequential choices. He backs this conclusion with extensive interview and documentary evidence collected during field visits and from his interactions with rebel leaders and administrators.

Mampilly takes rebel agency seriously. Most rebels want to rule civilians, but rule requires considerable discipline among rebels and it claims resources that they could use for fighting. Yet ruling civilians brings rebels in contact with local material and political resources under civilian control. Effective rebel rule provides rebels with information from civilians about the activities of their enemies and rivals within rebel ranks. Equipped with such information, rebels can use violence selectively to address these challenges. Rule becomes more viable as rebels refrain from mistreating local people and avoid attracting international condemnation. In reality rebels have to make tough choices as they confront splits in their ranks, claim credit for services that NGOs provide, and contend with militias in addition to national armies. Mampilly calls this an interactional approach in which key actors identify opportunities and adjust strategies accordingly. These rebel leaders are not slaves to resource curses or factional tensions or cross-border patrons. These variables weigh in the balance, but rebels use strengths to compensate for weaknesses, and clever leadership matters too.

Diving into the case studies, Mampilly explains that the dense institutions of the effective Sri Lankan state gave the Tamil Tigers an administration they could appropriate as they became rebel rulers. The bad news for rebels in Sudan and Congo is that civilians there had learned how to live without effective state institutions under preconflict regimes. Adept at evading the state, those civilians evaded rebels too, leaving these rebels to rule through a mix of coercion and patronage, much like the old Congolese state. In Sudan rebels shared the political environment that tested the rulers of that state. The evidence in these cases shows how rebel organization and behavior are endogenous to wider contexts, or at the very least, how context stacks the odds heavily in favor of path dependency with the strategies of rule of the states that rebels fight.

Where is rebel agency? Mampilly explains that Sudan’s rebels were better rulers because they were separatists. Separatists have to show civilians that they can do better than the government as rulers of a new state. Sudan’s SPLA and its various factions struggled over choices of political strategies, and these choices mattered. But were they determinative? This consideration occurs alongside a broader implication of evidence in this book that effective rebel rule depends on a sort of Goldilocks principle, of fighting in a state that is not too strong and not too weak. Failed states produce failed rebel rulers while strong ones defeat or suppress their rebels.

The interactional approach’s challenge to rival explanations requires careful consideration of cases in which data contradict predictions of conventional explanations. A consideration of Angola’s UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola) appears in the Congo chapter. These rebels drew resources from alluvial diamond mining operations. Conventional approaches would predict that a source of income available to any fighter with a few tools would undermine the hierarchy of command and enhance the fighter’s uses of violence for personal material gain. UNITA did pursue a Maoist strategy of rule organized...